Zifashion.com COO Lawrence Liou on brand building and social media marketing

It is always my personal interest and passion in creating business venture and brand building. Back in year 2008, Lin coined an idea to start an online selling of ladies fashion apparel, hand bags, fashion accessories part timely with blog. Lin is a Art graduate experience with Photoshop, Coreldraw and designing software but with little knowledge in e-commerce and IT knowledge, she started a blog in blogspot call http :// prettygirlscollections . blogspot . com .

The simple blogspot surprising does draw some fans and buyer with majority from close friends, colleague and referral friend. From her venture, we learnt that, Malaysia online customer has developed trust and more acceptance toward online purchase, with bank in the money prior to view receiving goods. The blogspot was operating for about nine months and we are getting more and more positive feedback and encouraging sales from customer. Our blog then is neither google search favor nor SEO optimise. I observed that zifashion.com draw her customer mainly from local ladies and mummy forum that discuss ladies talk, pregnancy, baby sitting, fashion and etc. These forum generated sales are big enough to cover Zifashion limited inventory and some cross sales item from affiliate partner. The prettygirlscollections . blogspot . com gain high poplularity in the forum, client likes our merchandise items and Lin follower getting more.

The lesson that we learnt from forum is that customer will refer and post their satisfaction comment on the forum. Lin has built a group of fans or perhaps friends that spend hours chatting about any topics like children, school, cooking and etc.. The friendship and trust is built and they even exchange email id and phone no. These are Zifashion.com loyal customer till now.

As an online marketer, we started to utilise online facility like skype (juelchong@skype.com) , MSN (zifashion@live.com) for live chat and communication, Google picassa ( http :// picasaweb . google . com /102942841436663314635) for product catalog sharing. All these help us to communicate, collaborate and sharing information more productive and effectively.

The born of Zifashion.com

The prettygirlscollections blogspot name is long and difficult to remember, we lost some customer for that reason as customer seldom bookmark the page that visited and they

forgotten whom they have bought from earlier. In 2009, we decided to change and migrate our blog to a shopping cart and change the store name to a shorter and easier remember domain name. We summarize the following must have criteria for the new online store that we are going to construct:

1. Short and easy remember domain name2. The domain name must carry word that is google search friendly3. User friendly and easy maintain shopping cart4. Low maintenance fees

and we finalise with www . zifashion . com as Zi is the middle name of our two daughters, fashion is the common word and related to our nature of business. We adopted an open source shopping cart from China (Ecshop) as for its user friendliness and almost free software. We created a pinky logo for zifashion as assume to the ladies like product that we are selling.

Lin put a lot of effort and time in maintaining the web page. We created a facebook fans page facebook . com / zifashion and started to invited friend and members.

Facebook is among the best marketing tools to us, we publish product information on the page, answering fans comment and analysing our fans and customer product preferences. We see our sales grow in relative with our fans no.　We allocate budget and consistently advertise in facebook and Google adword.

Besides facebook, more social media tools such as twitter ( twitter . com / zifashion ) , Online PR news, Scribd, Slideshare, Picassa, Google Doc, online bookmark like del.icio.us, digg and etc are being used more agreesive to create brand awareness and to attract more customer.

In mid 2009, Zifashion.com’s Ecshop shopping cart was hacked due to the software security loophole and the store was close for almost 3 weeks for upgrade. With such bad experience, we are very conscious of picking our next shopping cart tools that not only user friendly but should build with robust security features and payment gateway. In the same year, we invest migrate our shopping cart to the current shopping cart by provide by webshapper:

To be continue ..